AN AFTERNOON IN ...

Bexhill-on-Sea is a low-key kind of place full of tea shops and retirement homes and, more interestingly, home to the extraordinary De La Warr Pavilion (right), one of the finest bits of modernist architecture in the country. It's a fabulous building, all light and space and clean white lines, designed by Eric Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayeff and built under the enlightened patronage of the 9th Earl De La Warr in 1935. It's history since then has been a chequered one: damaged in the war and smothered by swirly carpets and wallpapers in the decades that followed, but happily now undergoing the right sort of restoration. The first-floor gallery houses an excellent programme of temporary exhibitions. Recent shows have included Ben Nicholson, Ivon Hitchens and, most recently of all, the intensely stylish 1930s painter known simply as Gluck. As of this week you can see Martin Parr's West Bay, photographs giving a wonderfully off-centre view of seaside life.